


A Hundred Os and Xs

by cicak



Series: TREKLOCK [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 04:53:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson was the luckiest man on the ship, right up until the moment he wasn't. An exploding ship and the universe's worst Vulcan roommate are just the icing on the cake.</p>
<p>BBC!Sherlock and Star Trek AOS fusion. A romantic comedy of galactic errors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A thousand eroded pieces of a man

When John Watson was a young boy he once had to spend a month wearing an eye patch when he strained his eyes trying to see the stars in the night sky. It was deeply ironic that at the time in human history of his birth, unless you were in very rural areas or specially preserved areas of outstanding natural beauty, the light effluence of the sheer density of the human race meant they could no longer see the stars from the earth, only the vessels they had built to explore them. Coupled with a minor geological accident that had occurred a few months before John’s birth that was projected to pass in around 15 years, and there were many jokes made about how the Northern Europeans had finally managed to achieve the perfect level of terrible weather to keep them at optimal complaining levels. John grew up knowing the sun as a vague haze that meant mandatory Vitamin D supplements and cheery fortification in his orange juice, an inability to cope without sunglasses when on holiday, and the stars as a thing you saw pictures of, or the faintest pinpricks of light on especially clear days.

 

John spent a lot of his childhood hiding on the roof of his house, getting up there by way of the old rotten tree his Father had always sworn to cut down in his more sober moments, and was forbidden to do so when under the influence of the twin vices of alcohol and testosterone. Huddled in a blanket, he would watch the faint streaks of starships, space stations and the gentle winking of the space elevator go by in their low, graceful orbits, and not the burning hydrogen mass of the heavenly stars that had shone so brightly for all of history. Nevertheless, human progress finds a way, he had a widget on his comm that told you which of the bright lights belonged to which craft, one that detailed their registration, shipyard and crew rosters and, for a small, nominal fee, allowed you to connect to their websites and see testimonies about their battles and discoveries, and see their perspective on the world, its clear swirl of blue, green and brown and, at last, the distant stars finally visible without the haze of the atmosphere blocking their dim, ancient light.

 

John was as obsessed with stars, with space, with travel, with Starfleet and with aliens and adventure as much as any small boy of his age and time should be. He played ‘Captain Archer’ with his school friends and very occasionally was allowed to be the captain, but he was normally required to be the dog because of his size (obviously when John was Porthos he was a battle dog who shot lasers from his eyes and frequently saved the day, because John Watson was eight, and lasers are an important part of a young boy’s development, and he had yet to grow out of the need to play the part of the hero).

 

He spent more nights on the roof, staring out at the universe from the cameras on the ships, then later hiding from his family, hiding from loss and heartbreak and deadlines, even after the tree fell victim to its rotten core and took John’s first hoverbike with it, the unending blackness was always there, always calling, its pinpricks of light slowly fading back from the fog.

 

The last time John Watson had climbed onto that roof was the night before he was due to move to San Francisco and begin his own adventure into the blackness of space. His mother had thrown a party, and so escape from ex-girlfriends and irritating cousins and Harry's by then nascent alcoholism was required, and the roof, with its chrome ladder, seemed the perfect final escape. By then the aerophytoplankton had done their job and the stars were visible again, and John made special effort to take in their majesty with the last reaches of his innocent mind.

 

* * *

 

When Sherlock Holmes was young there was a rumour at school that he was a Vulcan abandoned on Earth as a baby for being too obstinate and unfeeling even for the great stoic empire itself. The rumour spread through the school without reaching him for days, a susurrus that disappeared around corners in a peal of giggles that he was used to ignoring. So when someone asked him whether ‘it’ was true, he agreed, arrogance being a strong Holmesian trait even in the very young. Like the most malicious of all ‘its’, its cruelty burned audacious and poisonous – an idea, a fiction, something ridiculous that became myth.

 

As he aged the fiction of being an alien went through many iterations, morphing between a joke, then a wound, then an excuse, and then consumed into his personality so thoroughly that sometimes he needed to force himself to remember he wasn’t an exiled Vulcan princeling from the house of Surak itself, purely unemotional and perfectly logical and above all these human trivialities like love, or pain, or the exquisite burn of loneliness.

 

Over the years he never denied the rumours, despite the feelings that lived within him that raged like a torrent. The shame of them, the desire to feel less, to be less hurt by insults and the lack of kindness that felt like a spike through his whole body, that the convenient fiction of a feelingless race was enough for him, enough comfort to hide behind.

 

(He did not realise that this intensity of feeling made him closer to them than he ever could have pretended).

 

Such intense self-delusion culminated in the clusterfuck of events up to and including the brief time he spent at Starfleet, a time marked by the acts of shaving his eyebrows into points, growing his hair to cover his ears and insulting his lecturers in the name of logic. The final straw, an incident referred to as 'impersonating a Vulcan to the under-Ambassador' was one of the many, many reasons it was deemed by committee that he was not a ‘good fit’ for Starfleet, despite the legacy, the generations of his family that captained starships, brokered key first contacts that spread the federation through the galaxy and had both a small science scholarship and a research vessel named after them.

 

In excluding him, the committee recognised that the talents of Sherlock Holmes would always be desired, though not necessarily by the United Federation of Planets.

 

Sherlock Holmes packed his bag, fell into a transport, and went to ruin his body and mind with the greatest highs and lows the alpha quadrant could trade him.

 

History has taught us that decisions made by committee are not always those that go down as the best ones.

 

 

All in all, Sherlock Holmes was at Starfleet long enough to become completely disillusioned with the idea of serving a higher purpose but still imbued with the voracious need to consume space's secrets, to see the planets he’d never dreamed of, the places the childhood xenophobes had accused him of personifying, and places even his imagination couldn’t imagine. Meanwhile, by the time John Watson received his commission he loved Starfleet fiercely and without irony, but had lost his childhood curiosity for the mysteries of the universe, the stars feeling as muted as they’d appeared to him as a child through the thick plastering of smog. His love had fallen, slain by the wonders of the bodies of the races he learned the secrets of and the multitudes contained within them. He loved seeing as many different races, loved the pressure of the combat medicine modules and so a commission on a deep space mission was the natural place for him, even if he did not especially burn to spend his life in the black vacuum of space.

 

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson never met at Starfleet, though they overlapped by a few short weeks. They were in the same room once, a mixer for European students in one of the more permissive bars, but never crossed paths. John spent the night watching a girl with glory in her eyes swirl round the room, and Sherlock left ten minutes in to meet a man about an extinct quadruped. In some universes they did meet then and there, John bumping into Sherlock, Sherlock making a flippant statement that stumbled into a joke, and things possibly, maybe, changed and great stories started from there.

 

But in the way of this story, John Watson graduated from Starfleet Medical School to become Lieutenant Watson and ascended into the stars, where he patched up injured crewmembers, battled mysterious viruses, discreetly put back together the products of undocumented interspecies indiscretions and generally operated as his training taught him, a well respected member of the USS Metropolitan’s crew, and that would have been that, and in a million universes it was. But in this universe, everything went awry, sometime in the fourth year of his five year tour.

 

* * *

 

Stardate 2259.12

 

The stench of phaser burned flesh was definitely the best smell you’d ever smell at the worst of times, but when its your own muscle cooking, John thought, through the pain, the sound of your own fat sizzling like a hangover breakfast is something that will never leave you.

 

There's also the pain. The pain is also notably bad. The pain doesn’t get better. The smell goes, and eventually you’ll be able to stand near a barbeque without getting flashes and needing to scrub out your brain, but the memory of the pain remains sharp and haunting, like a knife between the ribs.

 

John wasn’t rescued for four days, and the security ensign with him died on day two, his wounds clogged with the strange sand that did indescribably horrible things to human flesh, and was slowly doing the same nightmare fractal pattern to John’s suppurating shoulder wound. He wasted as much of his water ration to keep it clean, but when they found him he still was crystalline at the edges and trying not to erode.

 

John was used to being in the field. The other members of the senior medical staff went on away missions as the shift patterns dictated, but only John truly enjoyed it, and was considered extremely good at it. The security teams loved him, loved the banter and the assurance that the doctor could look after himself if something went horribly wrong. When he returned what followed him were the whispered rumours round the ship, the ones that said that lucky John Watson wasn't as lucky as his reputation. That it was a bad sign, that John Watson had been injured. That John Watson had always been lucky, until that injury, and that his luck bucket was empty.

 

Ships have always been superstitious places, and starships are no different, even if all on board have taken formal logic to at least graduate level.

 

The prognosis was initially promising, despite what had happened never having been seen before by Starfleet Medical. Nerve damage in his left hand was bad, but there was hope that he could join a trial that had shown good outcomes so far, and he was responding well to regeneration until the authorisation for that went through. However, in what was later determined at tribunal to be unfortunate medical practice on the part of a stressed colleague led to a cross contamination with a virus that did further nerve damage, temporarily robbed him of his sight and left him dependent on periodic plasma transfusions and a future living under the spectre of a relapse that might kill him at any moment. The man who was eventually sent limping from sickbay to his quarters, pending medical discharge, was not lucky, apart from to still be alive.

 

The stares were bad, when he could drag himself down the corridors to various meetings and social events. He once tried to deflect some of the worst sudden silences with a ‘you should have seen the other guy’ joke when he ran into old buddies in the mess, but then remembered the poor Ensign bleeding out to become part of the shimmering sand of a paradise planet beset with a civil war that was doing nothing more than making the deserts grow, and never did again.

 

* * *

 

The Metro’, as she was known anywhere away from the Bridge, was a long range, deep space vessel and so she was equipped with everything a crew needs for deep space missions - an elegant amount of space, carefully designed methods of engagement and just enough luxury to stop them from going crazy. This, however, was a design reliant on a standard 40-hour shift pattern. Without the structure of work, John was going mad.

 

The holodeck was traditionally oversubscribed, and frankly exhausting at the best of times. With a long-term illness and depleted energy and fitness levels John was restricted (he suspected by some algorithm he was expected to know about) to the easiest of the holonovels and sports packages. These didn’t last long, and he refused to play a few on principal. He was forbidden to drink even synthehol due to a flag in his file that indicated that any ethanol derivatives were contraindicated, and the sad, apologetic beep of the replicator was frankly embarrassing and echoed through the officer’s rec far louder than it should have.

His days were spent reading, staring at the wall and walking through the ship as far as he could stand. The Metro was due to begin it’s return to Earth in half a year, and this far out it would take months of warp flight to even reach outer reaches of the solar system. It was important not to think about this, about the drag on of the alien stars and only hearing about missions from scraps of overheard conversation in the mess. The counsellor, a charming and busty humanoid whose accent he could never place, was very insistent that thinking, dwelling and wallowing in his dislocation from the sights, sounds and routine of the ship was dangerous. Having a routine, even a basic one, would help the days go past, especially as in deep space, even with the programmed biorhythms of the ship, time tended to become confused. John always smiled, nodded and promised he’d have more structure, that obviously as a medical officer he was well aware of the risks of Space-Related Time Dislocation, Post-trauma dissociation and good old fashioned PTSD. He was taking the correct precautions. Smile, shake hand, limp from the room.

 

Just because its the 23rd century doesn’t mean the human mind hasn’t lost the ability to find new ways to break. When he left sickbay he found that someone had relieved him of his phaser. He tried not to remember, at the darkest times, about the spare hidden round the crook of the port side Jeffries tube. He told himself that anyway, he wasn’t going to be able to reach it even if he wanted to use it, what with the arm. And the leg. And the currently inert virus swimming in his bloodstream that could reactivate at times of stress and kill him.

 

What had become of his life.

 

That night he dreamed he build a device, huge and hulking and grotesquely mechanical that snaked through the silent Jeffries tubes forever hunting, but not finding what it was looking for. A metal snake that he lost control of. A spectre loomed behind him, unseen. He felt the beam of the phaser inch through his shoulder in agonising slow motion and the smell fill the room, and the sand beneath his feet that he knew without looking was the remains of eroded men. He woke into the temperature controlled world drenched in sweat, and gave into tears, his back turned on the vent that seemed enormous and breathing with temptation to just end it all.

 

* * *

 

John was woken from what was probably too much sleep by the wail and glow of the Red Alert. He was dressed and into Sickbay faster than he should have been able to, and knew immediately that it was serious by the fact that Mike actually let him through the doors, let alone change into scrubs and triage the steady stream of casualties coming through the doors, to the point that they just wedged them open to spare everyone’s nerves their endless wooshing.

 

He worked shoulder-to-shoulder with his old colleagues for hours, and he felt like the best version of himself again - energised, high on adrenaline and the joys of engagement, even as he failed to save the grossly injured as they were beamed and bodily carried in. He had trained in the medicine of war for a reason, the addictive clear focus of a mind processing as quickly as possible was something he never could let go, could never want to forget.

 

He didn’t really have good narrative control over what happened exactly to the hundreds of people they processed, but the injuries told a story he would later have confirmed in the patchwork of impact wounds and punctures that spoke of buckling hulls and exploding bulkheads, vacuum injuries that whispered of the silence of space and the unexpected loss of all air that few lungs could cope with. He saw and read the story in missing limbs and bodies sheared in two or sliced across crucial systems, crushed nearly beyond repair but with their owners still awake, still aware inside the nightmare of their highly resilient bodies. The brutality added up to a ship badly damaged, perhaps one that tried to make a final burst of warp, returning from a fight or suffering from a mutiny, that tore itself apart trying to get away from its strife and the laws of physics, an act of desperation made on the fumes of blind hope.

 

The final total was 276 survivors from a manifest of nearly 4000. The Mieville had been lost; the largest piece recovered was barely taking up a quarter of a shuttle bay. It had been a huge cruiser type that had suffered an ambush and been badly damaged. They’d managed a series of small warp jumps before the hull breached and the order came to abandon ship just a moment too late to save everyone. It was a tragic story, and everyone was thankful that those who had survived had done so, but the problem existed that the constellation class Metropolitan had a crew complement of 549 and exactly three spare sets of quarters, and was at least 6 months from home.

 

John heard about it from his sickbed, the stress of the long emergency shift having done what the doctors had predicted and reactivated the dormant virus in his blood and bought him again to the brink of death. He watched his blood circulate outside his body as it was slowly and methodically cleaned, filtered and analysed in the hope of inducing another remission.

 

He managed to avoid death again, but John was discharged a week later to rejoin a ship different from the one he had lost. The hallways were heaving, there were now an extra two shifts to try and stagger meals and recreation and sanity. John was released into the aggressive tide of the change between epsilon and alpha, and struggled upstream to get back to his quarters, only to find that someone else was living in his room

 

Later, Mike would tell him that the ranking officer from the Mieville had come to his sickbed personally and asked his ‘permission’ to house his new roomate with him. John had apparently been animated enough that Mike had thought nothing of it, and the ranking officer had given John his reassurances that his new suitemate was the calmest possible option, really, Vulcans are so anally retentive they’re barely noticeable, perfect companions who won’t bring even a droplet of fire to the blood. John had no memory of this, and so the surprise when he entered his quarters to see them already occupied almost set his blood off again.

 

“Who are you? What are you doing in my rooms and - Hey! What are you doing to my replicator?!”

 

The individual looked up and scowled as John entered the quarters. He was definitely, to John’s great alarm, dissecting the replicator. Pieces lay strewn across the floor in no particular order. A selection of bags lay half open, their contents belched across the chair. John’s bed was still made, thankfully, the stranger had a Starfleet issue cot haphazardly made in the corner, but it had a large plant sitting on it, that John swore hissed gently in his general direction. He put that down to the residual antivirals in his system.

 

The stranger bounced up and strode across the room. He was obviously genetically Vulcan, despite maintaining some traits that expose him as one who was comfortable in mixed Federation company. His hair was cut in a style that John had last seen on some of the more rebellious firsties back at the Academy, which despite being hideous was no more ridiculous than the terrible standard Vulcan haircut, though a touch more fashionable than he’d ever expect from a Vulcan. His body language was a strange mix of the classic Vulcan near-distance that John had struggled to cope with at the Academy and something else he struggled to put his finger on, a kind of superficial charm that you never normally saw in Vulcans.

The stranger gave him the Vulcan salute, which John returned with a weak quirk of his ring finger.

“I am Cherlok. My captain made the arrangement that we will be sharing quarters until we return to Earth. Obviously under the circumstances it would be better for both of us to have our own rooms, but both your captain and mine have assured me you are a less odious example of humanity and capable of living by the rules we will no doubt have to agree on for this to work.”

John bristled. Vulcans have never been called ‘nice’, but this Cherlok was obviously unpopular for a reason.

Cherlok continued his diatribe as he returned to his cot, neatly stepping over the dismantled replicator as if it wasn’t the elephant in the room. “You have been assigned the beta shift as part of your return to duties, and so my schedule should not overly disturb you. I have been made aware of your illness and fragility, frivolously of course, your physical problems are obvious in the way you hold yourself, including the blood pathogen that is so obviously not triggered by what you think it is triggered by. I require as much privacy as possible, which includes stupid questions. If you wish to ask me anything, especially in light of the scarcity of my race, please save yourself the trouble and consult with one of the many comprehensive resources available to you as a Starfleet officer of leisure…”

 

This Vulcan asshole didn’t seem like he was shutting up, and John was far too exhausted for dealing with an egoist coming off treatment.

 

Plastering on the tight smile of the culturally English, he forced his way into the conversation. “Of course, I’m sure you’re right. Anyway, Lieutenant Doctor John Watson. I’m sure it will be a pleasure. Don’t mind me. Just thought I’d say hi. I’ll return later. Put the replicator back together or I’ll throw your belonging out of the third deck airlock. I’m very tired, and need to be somewhere else now. Bye.”

 

With that, John went and got as drunk as he possibly could on other people’s charity.

 

* * *

 

John hadn’t known many Vulcans at the academy, for all his attempts to befriend everyone regardless of planet of origin he had come across. They were still rare sights on campus, and tended to socialise together or if pressed become members of only the most incredibly earnest nerd extracurriculars. They were polite, and occasionally helpful, but ultimately aloof and not entirely keen to integrate with the rest of the Academy kids who barrelled around campus trying to make the entirely optimistic travel times Starfleet built into the timetable work.

John played chess for a semester, thinking that it’d be fun and strategically useful, but dropped it for sports and drinking, which in themselves were skills it was at least traditional to cultivate a healthy ability in. So he was unprepared for the reality of living with a Vulcan. Still, as an Officer of the Federation, he had undertaken six separate units of cultural sensitivity, and part of that was accepting that just because someone was from another culture, species or planet, didn't mean they couldn't be a dick.

 

John returned to his quarters a few hours later full of both l'esprit de chevalier and Rodriguez’s dire emergency tequila, but Cherlok had disappeared, and so he went to sleep, noting that the replicator at least seemed to be in one piece again.

 

John had entertained the idea of discretely enquiring as to whether it was absolutely necessary for him to have a roommate, after all he was recovering from a relapse of a very dangerous stress related illness and having such a strange and confusing constant presence in his life might be just the thing to set him off. However, his first proper round of the ship after the merging of the crews made the speech he was preparing to give to Captain Lestrade die on his lips.

People were everywhere. Enlisted and Junior Officers were already expected to share their small rooms with one of their compatriots, so the sheer lack of room for people to sleep in and the lack of personal space was now a problem for everyone. All the careful design that Starfleet’s best engineers had incorporated to make the Metropolitan a state-of-the-art deep space vessel designed to promote good mental health and conscientious working environment was out of the airlock. Spare spaces were portioned off into makeshift quarters, beds stacked for space with barely enough headspace for someone to wake from a nightmare. There still wasn’t enough room, and the twin problems of light and noise meant that morale was oozing along the floor looking for a fight. John retreated to his quarters as quickly as his various injuries would allow him to, and swore to put up with Cherlok’s inexplicability with better grace than he had been previously prepared to.

 

As Cherlok had rightly deduced, a trend John was hoping would not continue, John had reluctantly been allowed limited medical privileges again. Mike hadn’t wanted to, but Sickbay was still full of the sick and injured from the explosion of the Mieville and all the full time medical staff, already hurting from the loss of their trauma specialist in John, were overtaxed, burning out and coming apart at the exhaustion metaphors, and so John was given strict instructions that he was to deal with the routine and mundane medical problems and leave what he had been instructed not to call ‘interesting’ medical problems to the staff who weren’t liable to die if overvexed. It wasn’t their actual words, but John had become an expert in reading between the lines since he became ill and gossiped about.

 

John had been raised not to stereotype anyone, whether by positive or negative ways. The school system he had been raised in was keen to highlight that we were all individuals in our own right, except for those who aren’t, and conforming to models of typical behaviour did not make or break someone as a person.

That said, while John tried, his erstwhile suitemate was the least Vulcan Vulcan John had ever met. Even excluding his strange mode of dress, Cherlok was messy, inconsiderate and always in and out of John’s personal space like John’s privacy wasn’t worth anything. He was vain, prissy and by turns so sarcastic John had had to check whether his understanding that the Vulcan language had 100 words for stoicism and none for satire was in itself a joke.

 

By the end of the first week John had discovered (read: shamelessly gossiped) the following things about Cherlok from the minorly injured Mieville crew that passed through his clinic:

  1. Cherlok was probably a spy (from a security officer who had worked in the Mieville’s brig)

  2. Cherlok probably wasn’t a spy because no spy would be that conspicuous (from the Mieville’s deputy communications lieutenant)

  3. Cherlok had not been part of the regular crew roster of the Mieville and was there in a guest capacity (from the sous chef with the broken hand)

  4. Cherlok was part of Starfleet intelligence (from the warp core engineer with the interesting pattern of burns to his arse)

  5. Cherlok was a mystery shopper whose powers had gone to his head (from a Nuuvian guest who had been found clinging to wreckage and was being treated for breathing difficulties)

  6. Cherlok was probably responsible for the explosion of the Mieville. (from a worrying number of people)

  7. Cherlok was a dick and the worst (from everyone)




Tallyed, the verdict was worrying.

John had to concede that Cherlok was right on one count, their shift patterns were complimentary. John had not seen hide-nor-ridiculous-hair of him since the day they had met, though the room showed all the signs that Cherlok had been a. conducting more experiments and b. not sleeping. John watered the plant that was still occupying his cot and it waved its fronds at him in what he assumed was thanks.

 

After a full week of this, John came back to find Cherlok sitting on John’s bed. His PADD lay conspicuously askew, as if it had been thrown hastily away. Cherlok even looked guilty, as much as Vulcans could look anything.

Before he could stop himself John blurted out ‘Oh god Cherlok are you actually a spy? Because I don’t mind, but you’re the worst spy ever. Everyone says so.’

Cherlok quirked one eyebrow at him. “How many of my former shipmates have you been talking to?”

“I don’t know, you genius, why don’t you tell me” John snapped, suddenly more fed up with this conversation than he realised. “And why don’t you tell me why you’ve not slept, and why you think my virus isn’t triggered by adrenaline, when the best minds of Starfleet all agree that it is?”

Cherlok looked at him for a long moment before saying “I’m neither officially with Starfleet Intelligence or any number of intelligence organisations. Broadly, you could say I’m an independent contractor who can go places the federation can’t go and do things they can’t do to solve crimes.”

John frowned “That sounds like a spy.”

“Detective would be more accurate, if outdated. I collect clues, put together list of suspects, use logic and reason to deduce the probabilities that they committed the crime. I track difficult cases across multiple starships, working to solve crimes that are too difficult for the bureaucracy to solve. I’m not an official employee of the Federation, which gives me a certain flexibility that they and I both prize.

John snorts “So you’re what, a consultant and a detective? Two archaic terms for the price of one?”

“Sometimes the old ways are the best. A little hard work to find the things computer surveillance never could. Even starships have black spots, have things that only a pair of eyes can see. Surely you must realise that even these days things happen on this starship that the computer doesn’t realise are either happening, or are suspicious? This is a dominantly human ship, and humans are very good at subverting systems even just in the way they use their bodies.”

John pauses. “That’s brilliant. That’s absolutely ridiculous, but for some reason it makes me feel better. Were you chasing someone on the Mieville? Do you know why it blew up?”

Cherlok shook his head “I was merely gaining passage on the Mieville. Its fate is still a mystery, even to me.”

John did feel better, though the niggle that there was more to Cherlok than what he was saying was still there.

He didn't realise until much later that Cherlok still hadn't told him about his own goddamn virus.

 

* * *

 

Cherlok wasn’t that hard to live with once they started communicating. He was by far and away the most ridiculous person John had ever been forced to cohabit with, and some of his Academy roommates had been the kind of crazy that get you bought drinks for telling the stories, but Cherlok was a case of alcoholism-by-proxy just waiting for a good bar.

  
While he never had a hair out of place, Cherlok was a localised tornado of a man. Their quarters were always a state that made John’s military training cry a single tear. While Cherlok was perfectly composed at the heart of the room, everything he touched seemed to break or tear, destruction radiating out from him. Even weeks later the replicator still didn’t work properly, though it had started giving John synthehol again and so at least relaxing became a lot easier.

But deities help him, they got on, in their own way. Cherlok was interesting, he was always full of interesting facts and he was such a spectacularly bad liar that John could barely be offended by half the rude Vulcanisms he came out with.

Six months. What was six months in the grand scheme of things?


	2. Blackmail's such an ugly word

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where John is confused, Cherlok tries to help, and there are consequences to everyone running out of holos.

The first month of their cohabitation on the Metro’ went about as well as could honestly be suspected. John divided his day among trying to achieve as many of the 10 core tasks he had been assigned as part of his recovery as possible.

The first was theoretically the simplest. Wake up. John had never been a dozer, even on hazy, post coital mornings he never had a problem getting out of bed. However, in these modern times, this now posed its own unique challenges. Sometimes he woke up with the alarm, a soothing approximation of birdsong on many planets that Starfleet probably spent considerable manhours and resources getting exactly right. It was a feat though, enough to be calming as befitting a diplomatic and peacekeeping service, but also a piercing racket to get them out of rack and on with sack as befitting a military operation. The mornings he contemplated which birds made up the cacophony were the good days. Most days he woke up because Cherlok was tinkering with something behind his privacy screen that had either caught fire (causing an alarm to go off) or gone awry much to Cherlok’s indignation (horrified yell of frustrated contempt and cursing in multiple languages including French, Vulcan and Galactic Hebrew). Those were the bad days, because his mood was shot and Cherlok had already used the replicator and therefore John refused to order coffee after him after the time with the bees, which should have been impossible and yet happened.

Communication was on the list, which, well. Though he chatted with his staff, every attempt to make small talk with Cherlok felt like an actual achievement, so this was what he noted down. Generally, this specific task was abandoned most days as Cherlok was either asleep, acting suspiciously or doing something John did not want to know about.

Walking. The makeshift drop in sickbay in cargo bay 3 was a good twenty minute limp from his quarters, so his aim was to make it without incident or pitying look. This was probably the easiest, despite the crowded elevators.

Correct nutrition. This usually translated as ‘procure more coffee’. This was done either by attempting ration fraud through a variety of means. Most frequent sources were the rations of his field nurse when he wasn’t looking, Cherlok’s rations John had managed to con out of him as he was obviously not using them and could be exchanged for partaking in strange experiments, or just by stealing it from someone else’s desk using the timeless ‘Look, a Unicorn!’ gambit.

Complete an eight hour shift of minor injuries, vague viruses, routine appointments and other mindnumbing feats of medical science.

Make, and then cancel plans for that evening. Its the attempt that counts.

Drink synthehol in his quarters and hope Cherlok won’t come back and judge him.

Be judged by Cherlok anyway, because fuck John’s life. This was not actually a point on the recovery scale, but there were ‘custom’ fields in the proforma, so John recorded it for completeness.

Have an interesting conversation with Cherlok whilst attempting to bond, mostly by watching compulsively addictive holos and eating whatever replicator experiment Cherlok insisted was safe. Cherlok liked the holos about schools of obscure dance far more than he would ever admit.

Pass out. (Surprisingly difficult.)

The only variations were on designated rec-days and the days when John had to go into proper sickbay to have his blood cleaned and tested. Those days were always the hardest, because he felt like a junkie when faced with the bustle of sickbay. Doctor Inksbreak was coping admirably at picking up more trauma patients, but he was a musculoskeletal specialist at heart and so there were crucial gaps in his knowledge that John knew through the grapevine were proving to be so hard for him to cope with.

\---

John did enjoy his little clinic, despite his yearning for the bright lights and the adrenaline rush of trauma patients. Cargo Bay two was split into several overflow areas of which John had control over three. He was responsible for a staff of four, two nurses he had inherited from the Mieville who despite being slightly traumatised turned out to be scandalously overqualified for their commission, a medical diagnostician he had vaguely known from sickbay as being borderline incompetent and a junior psychologist who swore a lot in front of his patients but also told the most outrageous stories about Mars University that he was forgiven. Their little team ran the slow drip of boring cases, routine check ups, mild injuries and awkward mishaps like a little machine, occasionally breaking down, but mostly ticking along.

John suspected he’d been taking on more of what Cherlok had been saying at him about the science of deduction when he remarked to a junior security officer that he should bring his girlfriend into the clinic on her next downshift to treat her broken finger, as it obviously hadn’t healed properly. The security officer was mortified, John remembering just a little too late that as a senior officer, he was supposed to actively ignore fraternisation. The official line was it was destructive for long-term missions, and that regulations were best respected when everyone kept their head down and concentrated on the pure and platonic depth of their friendships in private.

John and Cherlok’s own blossoming friendship was constantly being tested from all sides. Mike, who had taken to being incredibly invested in their friendship out of sheer boredom (‘in absence of any good holonovels left I’m forced, forced John, to realise that you and Cherlok are as close to Loreley and T’vrena from ‘A Place In The Stars’ as I’m going to get before the holodeck is back in service’), and declared that once it was ‘resolved’ he would split the proceeds from the publishing and holo rights with them. Others were less explicit, whispering when they walked through the halls together. A pretty woman with a third eye on her forehead John tried to chat up on a rare night he was able to leave their quarters spent half an hour raptuously describing how pair bonds are so rare on her planet, and at first John thought she was really keen, but then he followed her line of sight and caught Cherlok staring at him intently. When questioned, Cherlok said something about how his psychic powers would fade if he didn’t lose them, as there were no other Vulcans on board John was the closest he would get.

As far as John could tell Cherlok didn’t have any friends. Even though all the Mievillians had an opinion, some of whom even quite liked him in their own way, he didn’t seem close to someone. While Vulcans were never the chattiest lot, they still had companions and people they prefered to spend time with. Cherlok had John, and even then wasn’t really that sure about him, often having the look on his face similar to how a cat looks at you when you get new glasses. 

Cherlok was extremely cat-like. After a shift where seemingly no one on the ‘Metro had managed to fall, burn, explode, twist, sprain, trauma or catch any diseases on any part of their body, John woke what felt like minutes after falling asleep to the howling sirens of the red alert and his comm going insane with calls and screams. He went into blind panic, throwing on whatever clothes were nearby (which were of course Cherlok’s because John puts his clothes away) only to step into the corridor to find it silent and in twilight mode. Cherlok was standing against the opposite wall and staring at him in that piercing way, then before John could throw the shiftfit of all shitfits was all over him, running a tricorder, taking his pulse manually, examining his pupil response. He then declared that John had ‘passed’, and slunk off to wherever he went when he wasn’t making John’s life hell.

John went back to bed, and took the next shift as a personal one.

\---

It had been a particularly quiet clinic when for once the shadow looming over John turned out to be Cherlok. He looked his usual handsome, stylish self - apart from all the blood. A droplet of bright crimson fell off the end of his nose with impeccable comic timing. It splashed on the screen of John’s PADD.  
“Doctor Watson. I required your medical services”, he said unnecessarily. He looked extremely put out, it was half endearing and half completely irritating and so similar to the emotions John normally felt when dealing with Cherlok.  
“What about the other guy?” John said quickly, making up for the problems he was having getting to his feet. “That can’t be your blood. That is arterial blood. And its red.”  
“Of course its not my blood” Cherlok snapped. “I’m glad that the basic xenobiological difference between your race and mine is something you’ve managed to hang on to despite the years of head trauma and synthehol abuse. He’s fine. Okay, he’s not, but he’s with Doctor Stanford. They said he’ll be discharged within the month. IPC have been very pleased with my work, but they have asked, quite unreasonably, that I be ‘checked out’, or they won’t continue to let me into their files. Commander Lestrade was quite unreasonable when I appealed to his higher nature. I am making notes about all this. I require you to give me a clean bill of health so I can continue my work.”

John sighed. Living with Cherlok meant his blood was always well oxygenated.

Cherlok sighed himself, a small Vulcan sigh of frustration that John had got quite good at noticing recently. He sat easily on the biobed, but everything around him looked more disorganised than normal. “I had hoped that this diversion would last longer than it has. This ship is so stultifying. I can feel my synapses fusing with the tedium of it.”

“So while you’re here”, John said, hoping to move away from chapter 253 of ‘Cherlok is so bored he could die’, “you can help me with a bit of a puzzle”.

The last few weeks there had been quite a few crewmembers complaining of overloading circuits giving them burns. The treatment was just a few seconds with the dermal regenerator, and so not a serious medical problem, but John notices patterns now, which is why he was wondering - only crew members who were on the Metropolitan were being affected, not any of their guests from the Mieville. No one who rooms with Mieville crew had been affected either, it was only people who had already been in rooms at capacity and had not been allocated an extra room mate were affected. The circuit that was overloading was never the same one, sometimes door controls, sometimes personal effects, once notably the sonic shower. When engineering had checked the circuits they seemed to have malfunctioned for no discernable reason and therefore had been put down to the increased burden the ship’s systems were under.

“However,” John said decisively, “the warp core produces enough power to run the personal electrical systems of a small continent, and we were apparently assured at the initial meeting that the electrical systems would be absolutely fine and we had vast capacity. Its taking engineering days to get round to inspecting the damage. I believe they’re being tampered with, and the source is being removed before engineering can get round to it”.

“Your deductions are passably logical, John” Cherlok sneered. “You should also work under the assumption that the culprit is a member of Engineering, possibly in a fairly senior position. It is only logical.”

“Right” John said. “So I think there might be a pattern to these. Can you have a look at some names and check whether you can see who the next victim might be? By the way, you’re fine. You just had blood on you. Shall I write a note to Captain Lestrade or will you just harass him until he lets you continue on your quest for stimulus?”

If anyone told John that Vulcans didn’t have emotions he would laugh at them. He was definitely getting good at seeing them in Cherlok’s minute facial twitches. Maybe it was his new power, making Vulcans have emotional responses. Maybe it would be what Starfleet would reassign him to do once he had to leave the ship.

 

Cracking the code did not take Cherlok long, but at least kept him busy for the rest of the shift. He swished into John’s clinic as he was coincindentally treating that day’s victim - a pretty ensign with burns to both his hands.

“Ah, Mister Jibodu, just as I expected.”

“Ignore him” John said hastily, as the ensign’s face lost colour. “He’s insane. And anyway, he didn’t do this to you. I was with him all last night.”

When Jibodu left, with a wide grin and a nod to both John and Cherlok, John put his head in his hands, the red flush released to make its way up his cheeks.

“It is illogical to be upset, John, you are unable to copulate with 83% of the crew because of your rank and 11% of the rest are far too ‘exciting’ for your pathogens to take, if you believe Doctor Stamford.”

John counted to ten. He was trying out a method where each time you continue on from the last number you made it to the previous time. He was almost at the year of the enlightenment. He hoped it was a sign he’d be able to cope with Cherlok better after he reached it.

‘Come’, Cherlok pronounced, as if an awkward silence had not even happened. ‘We must go and stake out the next victim, and try and catch the culprit interfering with the circuitry.’

Staking out the victim involved John having to sweet talk his way into Ensign Cantrell’s room in a hurry, because Cherlok originally had volunteered to do it and had managed to cock it up so badly that John had to abandon his sentry role to rescue him from being frogmarched to the brig. 

“Sorry, Ensign. My esteemed vulcan friend had decided that he needed to improve his interpersonal skills at the absolute worst time. We shall be on our way.”  
Out of nowhere, Sherlock blithly said “If I were you I’d find a better cover for that flask of deuterium. I can only deduce what Milverton must have on you to force you to steal so much.”  
Catrell promptly burst into tears.

Starship grade processed deuterium, and its antimatter counterpart, was one of those things that were easy to sell on the black market. Even though matter-antimatter reactors were hardly a Federation secret, there were always dark, shady or stupid groups who wanted faster than light travel, even if they were more likely to find themselves an empty grave as they were smeared across their hideout trying it out. 

Ensign Cantrell cried about guilt, one of the founding elements of the human psyche. That Lieutenant Milverton had caught her shirking her mundane duties, and that it was old fashioned extortion, nothing fancy. She didn’t know what he was going to do with the things she stole. She said he would let himself into her quarters, and then pick up the goods. It was a simple way, she said. No one was ever in the bowels of the ship where the Ensigns’ quarters were outside of shift change.  
John took in her small room, an extra camp bed wedged between the dorm-like setup of her room. The sparse few reminders of home that were practical to bring, a recreational PADD, a old, worn blanket draped neatly over the foot of the bed, its dirty crocheted fringe unravelling from being worried by stressed fingers. He wasn’t surprised that they spent all their time away from it.

John wanders back to their quarters after they left the Ensigns’ quarters. Cherlok was preoccupied, and sped off, muttering in a language John hadn’t the beginning of a clue to decipher, abandoning him to limp back slowly to what was left of his down-shift. When he let himself into their rooms, he was surprised and literally staggered by a blow to the side of the head.

Lieutenant Milverton frowned at him. “You should have been rendered unconscious by that”, he pouted, seeming put out.  
John shrugged, and winced at the spike of pain. “We Watsons have strong heads.” It throbbed, and he felt even more unbalanced than normal.  
Milverton took another swing at him, which he managed to duck his head, only to be hit on his right shoulder joint by the edge of the engineering panel that Milverton was using as a weapon, right where his wound was brittle and tainted from his time on the planet. He went down hard, and braced himself for the finishing blow.  
Instead, Milverton made the rookie mistake of the novice villain. “John Watson! Your luck really has expired, hasn’t it? I was blood brothers with Murray, you know? Everyone has theories about what really happened on that planet, about how much ‘fleet knew before they sent down all those poor souls to die. And how you, you survived. Even though that was lucky, you were still tainted. A fate worse than -”

And on his crescendo, Milverton collapsed on top of him, a dead weight. Above, John could see an open ceiling panel and a pleased looking Cherlok, who had nerve pinched Milverton into submission.

“I think we should call security” was all he said. Not enquiring how John was. John literally saw red, and while it was likely the gushing blood of his head wound, he used it as excuse to yell at Cherlok.  
“How dare you use me as bait? If we are to do this Cherlok, we are going to set some rules, that involve full disclosure of plans, and you having half a modicum of respect for me and my limits and you not abandoning me! I, fuck, I have to get to sickbay. They’re going to have to put me on dialysis as soon as possible. Fuck. You fucking awful man. Thank you for saving my life.”

“You just pushed a full grown, dead weight man off your body. You are recovering, John Watson. You are not the husk you think you are. You are the fallow field, coming back to life. Do not panic. You performed admirably, and you did not overexert yourself. You held him off while I had time to break into his quarters and destroy the evidence he held on the junior crewmembers. The stolen goods are all there -” his communicator chirped - “and there are security, wanting to know my status. I shall alert them that I have Milverton. Go to sickbay. I accept your conditions. I shall see you soon.”

\---

For only the second time in their short friendship, Cherlok came to visit John at work. He looked contrite, which was a new facial expression to add to John’s ‘Guide to Recognising His Moods’ file on his PADD.  
“Milverton died this morning. Stamford just pronounced him. Seemingly, an electrical coupling that happened to run past his cell exploded, and he got a shard of metal to the neck. Engineering, naturally, cannot work out how it happened.”

“It could be anyone” John said, quietly.  
“It could have equally have been an accident” Cherlok replied, sitting on the biobed. “We all have secrets, John”, Cherlok intoned seriously, looking up and meeting John’s eyes. “Even me.”  
John couldn’t help but let out a snort of laughter. “Cherlok, you are nothing but secrets. I doubt you even know the depth of them”.

Normally, that would have put Cherlok into one of his Vulcan huffs, and he would flounce out all terrible hair and swirling clothes. But this time, he didn’t. He looked down at his hands clasped in his lap on the biobed, and spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “Did you never wonder why the Mieville was in such deep space? And what happened right before the explosion? I’ve seen things, John. Sometimes I think I’ll never be able to fully process it.”

Cherlok stood up suddenly, and then he was in John’s space, their knees touching awkwardly. He had a looming quality that meant that John had a view of the undersides of his zygomas, the delicate upturn of his ears, his eyes the blue of storms and...John was having those thoughts that he really should not be having again.

John gripped Cherlok’s hand, trying to do so as meaningfully as possible for someone who once tested so off the bottom of the psi-scale they gave him a special certificate.  
The human race isn’t even in the top five most prolific producers of pornographic holograms if you actually look at the trade statistics, but mention porn holos and everyone comes out with the same tired tropes that litter human porn. Naturally, a lot of them involve Vulcans. What can you say, you always remember your first. Everyone knew one thing about those holos about the slutty Vulcan chicks who are all buttoned up in robes until you touch their hands and then the robes come off and they're emotionally compromised alright. 

Cherlok gripped his hand desperately and made an undignified noise. Then he wrenched his hand away, panting, and giving John an agonised look, fled.

"Well" John said to himself, turning to pack away his hypos and bandages, "that went about as well as could be expected."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear, even if no one is reading this, I am going to finish this story if it kills me.
> 
> [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> So this started when Kafers sent me her [Treklock picture](http://kafers.tumblr.com/post/47715513541/i-thought-id-post-a-more-detailed-version-of-my) and I thought 'hey, I'll just knock off a quick thing where instead of being a sociopath young Sherlock convinced himself he was a Vulcan ho ho ho I'm so witty'. That was 8 months ago.
> 
>  
> 
> [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


End file.
